REVIEW:
Animated Retelling of the Birth of Islam

By: Dana Stevens
Date: 13 November 2004
Source: New York Times
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/movies/13prop.ht...0973913-EkR2aPW7NZ2mZ4xHj/txZA

Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]

There is perhaps no medium better suited to mythmaking than the animated movie. Liberated from the physical constraints of the material world, cartoon characters are free to defy gravity or to perform miracles at the animator's behest. Animation is the medium of superheroes and gods, ideal for representing the impossible or the sublime: the Medusa's head that turns men to stone, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound or even the divine revelation of God on earth.

But in "Muhammad: The Last Prophet," an animated retelling of the events surrounding the birth of Islam, the filmmakers faced a distinct challenge: How do you animate a main character who can never be shown? According to Islamic law, the prophet himself, along with many of his close relatives, cannot be visually represented - a restriction that has given rise to a great tradition of abstract motifs in Islamic art, but that would seem ill suited to traditional Disney-style animation.

Richard Rich (who also directed the animated movies "The Fox and the Hound" and "The King and I," among others) has chosen to address this narrative obstacle head-on: borrowing a trick from the 1946 film noir "The Lady in the Lake," he has simply made Muhammad's point of view the audience's own. Imagine wearing a camera strapped to your head like a miner's light, so that the world around you lurches with every step; such is the prophet's-eye-view technique used for scenes directly involving the title character. Fortunately for the audience's sense of orientation, these scenes are relatively rare. Muhammad is also provided with a kind of secular stand-in, a follower who recounts the story of Islam to his young daughter.

"Muhammad: The Last Prophet" was to open in the United States in 2002 but was shelved after the 9/11 attacks for fear of anti-Muslim sentiment. Now, two years after its release in the Islamic world, the film is opening in 37 cities across the country. Its release tomorrow coincides with Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

Trimmed from its original 4 1/2-hour running time, at 90 minutes, "Muhammad" still feels long. Its pace is stately as it sketches the essentials of the prophet's life, beginning with his retreat to a cave outside the debauched city of Mecca, where he receives a vision from the Angel Gabriel. Returning to the city, Muhammad begins to preach monotheism and charity, alienating the Kuraysh, the ruling body of pre-Islamic Mecca. (This council of elders is represented as a band of stock cartoon villains, stroking their beards and cackling as they come up with evil plans to oppress Muhammed's followers: "That's it! We'll treat them like outcasts!")

Eventually, the beleaguered Muslims escape to Medina, where they wage several epic battles against the Meccans before defeating them in the miraculous Battle of the Ditch and returning to Mecca in triumph.

Seemingly faithful to its source material, "Muhammad" is a pious and ponderous film, unlikely to move audiences who are not already familiar with its story. The script (by Brian Nissen) feels heavily vetted by Islamic scholars, without wit or whimsy. The literalism of the subjective-camera conceit is at times unintentionally comic: when Muhammed rides a horse into battle, the animal's head bobs repeatedly in the middle of the frame, undercutting the moment's nobility. When he is wounded in battle, a rock flies straight at the camera, and suddenly followers gather to inquire after "our" health. The camera literally puts the viewer in the position of the divine messenger, a disquieting device that never quite accomplishes its task. It's hard to be awed by the sublimity of the offscreen prophet when you are the offscreen prophet, munching Jujyfruits in your theater seat.

The film's animation (hand drawn in the old style, with some computer effects) is at its strongest when it abandons Disneyesque realism and strives for a style of its own. At moments, the visuals approach a kind of divine abstraction. The encounter between Muhammad and the Angel Gabriel, represented only by a glowing orb, is very nearly avant-garde. Some of the later battle sequences are also highly stylized: figures in the foreground appear in sharp relief, while the crowds in the background are blurred. The palette is subdued and earthy, with occasional painted backgrounds of spectacularly lighted cloudscapes, and the texture of velvet in the rich red and blue robes of the Kuraysh is particularly well evoked. The film is set to a loud, surging score by William Kidd, with a special leitmotif reserved for the appearances of the prophet.

"Muhammad: the Last Prophet" will inevitably be compared to Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ." Some may label it propaganda, a 90-minute commercial for Islam. But "Muhammad" is likely to prove less divisive than Mr. Gibson's film, if only because its scenes of violence and battle (there are many) are without gore or graphic detail. The film was explicitly intended to bring Western audiences a more positive vision of Islam than the one experienced through mainstream media.

Midway through the film there is an encounter between Muhammad's followers and a Christian king in Abyssinia who agrees to offer them asylum. Their conversation, one of the most explicitly theological in the film, stresses the link between the two religions: "What you preach," the king marvels, "is the gospel of Jesus," before observing that the two religions are like different beams of light emanating from the same divine source.

Though its execution may at times seem as plodding as the cartoon horse that Muhammad rides into battle, "Muhammad: The Last Prophet" is, in its way, a triumph of globalization, a polished, Western-style entertainment about a distinctly non-Western subject. Its message, like the Abyssinian king's, is finally one of reconciliation: we're not as different as we seem.

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